After returning from Spain
and divorcing Pauline, Hemingway and Martha moved to a large house
outside Havana, Cuba. They named it Finca Vigia ("Lookout
Farm"), and Hemingway decorated it with hunting trophies from his
African safari. He had begun work on For Whom The Bell Tolls in
1939 in Cuba and worked on it on the road as he traveled back to Key
West or to Wyoming or to Sun Valley, finishing it in July of 1940. The
book was a huge success, both critically and commercially, prompting
Sinclair Lewis to write that it was "the American book published
during the three years past which was most likely to survive, to be know
fifty years from now, or possibly a hundred...it might just possibly be
a masterpiece, a classic..." Oddly, the book was unanimously voted
the best novel of the year by the Pulitzer Prize committee, but was
vetoed for political reason by the conservative president of Columbia
University; no prize was awarded that year. The book sold over 500,000
copies in just six months, and continues to sell well today.

The next ten years would be
a creatively fallow period for Hemingway, (it would be 1950 before he
would publish another novel) but while he looked more interested in
bolstering his public image at the expense of his work, he was actually
immersed in several large writing projects which he could never seem to
complete. During the 1940's he worked on what would become the heavily
edited and posthumously published novels Islands In The Stream
and The Garden Of Eden. In between he would also cover (and some
say participate in) World War II, and he would divorce his third wife
Martha to marry his fourth, Mary Welsh. In an insightful essay on
Hemingway, E. L. Doctorow writes of Hemingway's work during the
40's, discussing The Garden of Eden in particular. "That
is exciting because it gives evidence, despite his celebrity, despite
his Nobel, despite the torments of his own physical self punishment, of
a writer still developing. Those same writing strategies Hemingway
formulated to such triumph in his early work came to entrap him in the
later...I would like to think that as he began "The Garden of
Eden," his very next novel after that war work (For Whom the Bell
Tolls), he realized this and wanted to retool, to remake himself. That
he would fail is almost not the point--but that he would have tried,
which is the true bravery of a writer..."

After his work covering the
Spanish Civil War and the subsequent work on his novel For Whom the
Bell Tolls, Hemingway took on another assignment, covering the
Chinese-Japanese war in 1941. He traveled with his wife Martha and wrote
dispatches about the war for PM Magazine. It was a tedious trip and
Hemingway was glad to return to Cuba for some well deserved rest. He
didn't stay still long. By 1942 Hemingway had undertaken an undercover
operation to hunt down German submarines in the Atlantic ocean off the
coast of Cuba. Hemingway gathered some of his friends, as well as a few
professional operatives, then outfitted his boat Pilar with radio
equipment, extra fuel tanks and a nice quantity of ordnance, hoping that
if he ever located a German sub he could get close enough to drop a bomb
down the hatch. He called the gang the "Crook Factory."
Nothing ever came of their sub hunts except a good time fishing and
drinking together, in the process irritating Martha who thought
Hemingway was avoiding the responsibilities as a great writer to report
the real war then raging in Europe.